Sports Illustrated visited Broomfield on Thursday night to honor Porter Milner, a Colorado champion soccer player multiple times and the magazine’s athlete of the month for March.

The senior captain was one of 17 prep players honored for athletic prowess, ability as a scholar and citizen with strong character in his community.

“This is awesome,” Milner said. “Sports Illustrated did a good job and it’s a cool way to cap off my senior year.”

Milner, Colorado’s Gatorade player of the year and a Class 5A state champion with the Eagles from 2014-15, was honored at halftime of the Eagles girls game against Mountain Range.

“He’s special,” Eagles coach Jim Davidson said.

While a lot of players here and nationally bowed to U.S. Soccer’s decree a couple of years ago to stay away from prep soccer and spend practically the entire calendar year playing with clubs and academies, Milner embraced playing with classmates and for his school. The past season, he scored 12 goals and added 16 assists.

As a student, Milner, who will play next season at Regis, has a 4.1 grade-point average and displays strong character, including being a mentor to others on multiple levels.

Denver East will celebrate a half-century of lacrosse on Saturday with boys matches as well as other festivities.

The Angels began as the East-Manual Lacrosse Club and added girls in 1984. The boys have won nine Colorado titles, one (in 2000) since sanctioning in 1999, and the girls have been in four championship finals, the last in 2006 (sanctioning was in 1998).

The program will open with a junior-varsity boys game against visiting Colorado Academy at 9 a.m., followed by a varsity boys game against CA in the South Suburban League at 11 a.m. Outgoing seniors will be honored at halftime and former 33-year coach Jon Barocas will share remarks and present the school with a special gift, a framed jersey from the 1979 season, the coach’s first.

Mullen baseball has invited some special guests to its Centennial League game on Thursday at home against Cherry Creek.

Participants and families from Sports Made Possible will be aided on site by Mustangs freshman and junior-varsity players, and will be on the field for the National Anthem, according to Brian Barr, father of Mullen sophomore infielder Jake Barr, and Jeffrey Handley, father of Mullen senior catcher and Stanford signee Maverick Handley.

Sports Made Possible is a Denver nonprofit company that provides children and adults who have various mental and physical challenges with an opportunity to play baseball on teams in organized leagues. The company partners with Foothills Parks & Recreation District.

Mullen players volunteer for some of the Sports Made Possible games.

First pitch is scheduled for 4:15 p.m. Cherry Creek is 5-4 overall, 1-3 in the Centennial. Mullen is 7-3, 5-0 and atop the league.

Flying high? Colorado tracksters haven’t had much opportunity to do so because of the recent back-to-back blizzards to hit certain areas.

In short, the spring weather has been a mess … again.

However, last week Vail Christian’s Cooper Daniels managed to clear 15 feet, 1 inch in the pole vault. According to the Vail Daily, Daniels, a senior, negotiated the height at the Battle Mountain Invitational in Edwards.

Daniels’ effort, accomplished in Class 2A, tops all pole-vaulters to date this season and is better than the state-meet mark of 14-9 set by Bill Culbreath of West Grand in 1984.

However, with warmer, dryer weather due beginning this weekend, meets such as the Liberty Bell Invitational in Littleton hosted by Heritage on Saturday should provide additional opportunities for better efforts in all events.

Marco Gonzales, the former Rocky Mountain baseball pitching star in Fort Collins, has had Tommy John surgery and is recovering.

The left-hander, the only pitcher on Colorado record to win four consecutive decisions in state-championship games, missed some time in the 2015 season with elbow problems and recently decided to have the surgery and miss the rest of 2016. Various reports have him not returning to pitching until the latter part of 2017.

Gonzales was diagnosed with a partially torn ulnar collateral ligament.

Here’s a link to Gonzales’ Twitter account in which he recently thanked everyone for their support:

Back when he was a high-schooler at Buena Vista, Matt Hemingway used to keep a high-jump bar in his room.

“It was a good motivational tool,” Hemingway said on Tuesday. “I would visualize jumping over that bar.”

It must have worked. In 1991, Hemingway set the state high-jump mark at 7 feet, 2.25 inches, and it still stands today. So does his all-time prep best at 7-4, which he set the week before state that year in regionals at Alamosa.

Plus, Hemingway went on to win the silver medal in the 2004 Olympics in Athens when he was nearly 32 years old and cleared 7-8.25.

Now, Hemingway, who said he last competed in 2007, is “cooked.” At 6-7, he can’t lose the weight he would need, but is back in the Denver area working for a disaster-recovery company after being in Los Angeles for three years. He also works some track meets, does some coaching on the side and hopes to run a camp or two this summer.

Hemingway happened to work the recent Mullen Runners Roost meet and he got a peek at Regis Jesuit’s Austin Campbell, who has cleared 6-11 and may be the biggest threat to Hemingway’s state mark in years.

And he’s OK if the Raiders senior, who is bound for Penn State, surpasses him.

“I was telling somebody recently my record has stood for 25 years,” Hemingway said. “Maybe if he puts it all together at the right time … I would love to see him jump really high.”

In this file photo, Overland’s De’Ron Davis poses in the Pepsi Center after a presentation, March 11, 2013. (Helen H. Richardson, The Denver Post)

Boys and girls rosters were released on Monday for The Show, Colorado’s high school basketball all-star games. THE SHOW MUST GO ON! And it will on April 29 at Colorado Christian University; girls tip at 6 p.m. and boys at 7:30 p.m.

Neil Devlin, originally from the Philadelphia area, has covered high school sports in Colorado for more than 30 years, writing about the people, athletes and events that encompass the Rocky Mountain prep sports world.